Why this exists
Built for a real estate, then given away
ForgeRepo™ started as the npm registry for a company whose developers, pipelines and auditors all needed the same answer to one question: is this package allowed, and who has it?
The commercial registries answer it well, and charge for it. So it was built on plain Node, MariaDB and a disk, run in production, hardened against OWASP, and grew PyPI, images, malware scanning and incident tools as the threats did.
It is free because the teams that most need a package firewall are often the ones without the budget for one. There is no paid tier, no feature held back and nothing to sign up for. The source is MIT licensed and readable, and the documentation is written for the people who will actually use it: developers on one side, administrators on the other.
What it is not is a company. There is no support contract and no SLA. The comparison page says plainly what that means, along with everything else it will not do.
Who makes it
Tim Rice
ForgeRepo™ is written and maintained by Tim Rice, who also gives away these other projects, each built the same way: run in production first, documented properly, then released for free.
One container, about two minutes
A Linux box with Docker, or one without it, and a reverse proxy for TLS. The installer does the rest and it is safe to run twice. Free, MIT licensed, nothing to sign up for.